


Moirai

by Polly_Lynn



Category: Castle (TV 2009)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Friends to Lovers, Friendship, Partners to Lovers, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-04
Updated: 2020-04-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 21:33:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,387
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23474023
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Polly_Lynn/pseuds/Polly_Lynn
Summary: She doesn’t know what she wants. It’s more literal than usual.
Relationships: Kate Beckett & Richard Castle, Kate Beckett/Josh Davidson, Kate Beckett/Richard Castle
Comments: 7
Kudos: 12





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Set during Knockdown (3 x 13)

She doesn’t know what she wants. It’s more literal than usual. 

He sees it in the way she hesitates on his doorstep, in the way her eyes flick down to her own hands and feet, like she can’t believe they brought her here. Like she can’t believe they’re to blame for pushing the bell, for not carrying her away back down the hall in the long moment that spins out after he says her name, waiting for the snip of fate. 

He can’t really believe it either, even though she’s standing inarguably before him, and she wants to talk. She asks if they can, anyway, and when he says _Yes, of course. Yes,_ she makes her way inside. Eventually she makes her way inside. 

He gets the feeling that it’s not a choice—that she’s ruling things out, and coming inside is the lesser of two evils. He watches as her mind whirs and clicks and arrives at the conclusion that it’s better than hovering in the hallway, though not by a lot. 

She doesn’t take off her jacket, not even her gloves. That’s what will stay with him later. Afterward when he’s turning every second over and over in his mind, as the rest of him relives the fleeting kisses, that are the inevitable outcome of this—of her on his doorstep—his mind will try to hold on to the mundane details of what came before, as though they might somehow save him. 

He will recall with perfect clarity the way she leans on the kitchen counter and flattens her palms on it, the striking image of dark leather on cold, solid marble. His eyes will follow the flick of her gaze downward, and catalogue the thoughtful, deliberate flex of her muscles against the resistance of it, as though she were learning how it works. He will remember wondering if she would make herself into exactly that, if she could. He will remember wondering if she was remaking herself, right before his eyes, into a cold, solid thing. 

She doesn’t talk for a long while, in memory, in reality. He cannot, in retrospect, separate the two. She looks up at him, locked in a battle with herself that is as fierce as it is punishing. She chews her lip and looks up at him, but he’s silent, too. This seems to throw her—his silence. 

She might not know what she wants, but she has come to _expect_ certain things. She expects him to hover—to fill the silence by offering her something. Anything. She expects him to babble, to gloat, to provoke her, maybe, although not so much of that lately. 

She has come to expect him to spend every waking moment drawing her out. It’s an unkind thought—an ugly little half truth and a casualty of this in-between they’ve fallen into. 

She expects him to decipher each and every moment between them, and he does, though he’s weary with it. He prompts, he offers, he inquires. He _does_ spend every waking moment drawing her out, even though there’s anger sloshing around with everything he feels for her, there is impatience, because she’s better than this—she _could_ be better than this. 

But for all the anger, for all his weariness, he is still sorely tempted to play the host, and not just to ease some burden in her. He is tempted, as always, to use impeccable manners and the persona he slips in and out of as an excuse to stand behind her, to slide his palms along her shoulders and down her arms as he helps her off with her jacket—to rest a hand just behind her hip and guide her to a chair. He is tempted, as always, to give her things. To try to give her things. 

But he’s silent now, he is still. It’s half something he decides on, because he _is_ weary, because she _could_ be better. But it’s half something in her, too. 

There’s a deep-down seriousness to her, something beyond even the usual weight of sadness in her, and it rouses an answering seriousness in him. It pulls the words down inside him. It’s a sober, solemn anchor, and for once, nothing bubbles up in him. No words scale the distance from his heart to the tip of his tongue to meet her—to draw her out. 

He wants her to come to it on her own. For a whole host of reasons, he needs _her_ to know what she wants, so he leans on the short edge of the counter, at right angles, and he keeps his peace. He waits for her to find it, whatever it is she wants. He waits for her to ask. 

It’s her mother’s case. There’s nothing else in this world to bring her to him looking like this. The truth of it aches. He can’t believe how far they’ve come from _you and I are done_ to this _._ But for all that, it worries and gnaws at all the reasons he wants her to know what she wants, and he’s fighting back the words now. He’s fighting back a question for the first time since she knocked on his door. 

_What do you want, Beckett? Why are you here? Why_ here? 

But he swallows down the urge to ask, to speak at all. He swallows down the urge to remind her of his promise and hers, a short year ago and a long one. Such a long year. 

_I will do anything that you need_. _Including nothing._

_I’d like you around when I do._

He doesn’t remind her. She knows. She’s here, isn’t she? She’s not rushing in alone or falling down the rabbit hole. She’s here and not anywhere else. Not _with_ anyone else. She might not know what she wants, but she’s here, and the ache is a little less. 

So he doesn’t remind her. He doesn’t ask. He doesn’t say anything at all. 

He waits.   
  
  



	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> She doesn’t want Raglan’s tale of woe, his nostalgia for real coffee cups and incongruous literary metaphors out of the mouth of a man who might as well have come direct from central casting, and guilt that’s way too fucking long overdue. She doesn’t want to sit here and give this man, dying or not, the luxury of unburdening himself. 

She doesn’t want Raglan’s tale of woe, his nostalgia for real coffee cups and incongruous literary metaphors out of the mouth of a man who might as well have come direct from central casting, and guilt that’s way too fucking long overdue. She doesn’t want to sit here and give this man, dying or not, the luxury of unburdening himself. 

It’s progress of a sort, he thinks. He sits tense at her side and almost smiles to himself, because a Beckett who knows what she _doesn’t_ want—who is absolutely clear on what she’s having none of—is familiar at least. 

And the two of them are on the same page as far as Raglan goes. The Dickens tumbles from his own mouth, unbidden— _I wear the chains I forged in life—_ but he has no more patience for this than she does. Dying or not, there’s no misguided sympathy in him, and he hasn’t the least inclination to listen to one word from this man’s mouth that isn’t in service of bringing her some kind of peace. 

He shifts in the booth while Raglan rambles on about context—about nineteen years ago. He does the math in his head twice, three times. The truth jolts him each and every time. Twelve. She was _twelve._

He glances at her, and feels … scalded. Bleached. He can’t see it. In her profile in this late afternoon light, he can’t see anything on the far side of that January night. The realization comes on a wave of unutterable sadness. 

He knows her. He holds tight in the most difficult moments, when he is weary and angry, to the certainty that he _knows_ her. But just as certain is this: Not now—not once in three years—has he caught a glimpse of the bright little girl or the gawky, still-beautiful teen with braces. Not once has he spied the rebel in black leather. 

Even the things she sometimes tells him—about baseball and boyfriends, about a tattoo and a navel ring he’s dying to find out if she really has—all this things sound like stories she’s telling about someone she knew once. They’re all one degree of remove or more from the woman beside him, and not once has he caught a single, fleeting glance of who she was, who she might have been without the cowardice, the mundane fucking _wickedness_ of men like this. 

He hates him then. He _hates_ Raglan with a sudden fire that burns all the calm, all the all the stillness out of him. It eats away everything that’s kept him silent and waiting, content to make good on his promise to do whatever she might need, to just be at her side through this. It consumes every good intention, the realization of exactly how much the everyday evil of men like John Raglan have taken from her. 

He hates this man and whoever he’s in this with for _stealing_ who she could have been from the world, from her father, from him.

John Raglan stole all of that and what right does he have to that single note of pain, steady behind the rise and fall of his voice? What fucking _right_ does he have to sit there with a pack of Marlboros in his pocket and grey-skinned, shaking hands drawing warmth out of a ceramic mug? 

What. Fucking. _Right?_

Fury sings through him. It almost sends him across the table, fists raised. 

But the world ends before he can get there. 

* * *

He is sick in the rust-streaked toilet of diner’s bathroom. It’s just coffee and bile in the back of his throat. There’s nothing left inside to bring up, but his guts still heave. His body still clenches and shakes, and at the sight of blood on his hands, he’s sick all over again. He’s sick at the memory that it calls up—the dark spray fanning across her chest. 

He grips the edges of the none-too-steady sink. He leaves thick, tacky fingerprints on the dingy porcelain, red-going-brown, and the cycle starts again. A painful clench and an unsteady pitch forward that nearly knocks his head into the mirror. He’s trapped by his own body—by the riot of anger and fear let loose in that instant. 

_You’re hit._

_I’m fine. It’s not my blood._

He’s trapped until the sound of sirens breaks through the shock booming and ringing between his ears and the roar of his own thoughts. He is motionless, silent, though anything but quiet in his mind and soul and heart, until the sounds of equipment and busy voices and action galvanize him at last.

He wrenches the taps open. He scalds himself, and soundless, open-mouthed figure in the scarred mirror makes him jump back, dragging a sluice of punishingly hot water with him. He tries again and makes his fingers stiff with the rush of cold from pipes in the grip of a New York winter. He swipes cheap, stiff paper towels in between his fingers. He scrubs at his palms, at the backs of his hands, and the blood swirls away, just that simple. 

  
He shoulders his way through the door. He comes face to face with he, with that godawful Rorschach blot climbing the neck of her sweater. His knees almost fail. His feet almost go out from under him. 

“You good?” she asks. 

It’s brisk. Perfunctory, it seems, and a flash of anger lights him up that she could even fucking ask that. A flash of desperation uncoils within him, but then their eyes meet, and he sees … everything. He sees her fear and anguish. He sees the fury that lights her up. And he something flat and black and blank at the very back of her gaze that terrifies him. 

“Yeah,” he says faintly. “I think I got it all off my hands.” 

She hears him. She hears something in his voice and comes back to herself a moment.

“It’s different when it happens right in front of you.” She means it. Even though it sounds absurd coming from her. Even though it categorically _is_ absurd, given everything. Given her life, it’s absurd, and still she means it as a kindness. “Close enough to watch the lights go out.” 

“Yeah,” he says again, hating how trite it sounds. _Hating_ it enough that it drives the next words right out of his body. “When I saw the blood on your shirt I thought you’d been shot.”

The world ends again with those five words. It shifts on the shoulders of Atlas and cracks right open, and a new world is born. 

_I thought you’d been shot_. 

She falters before him. She is unsteady on her feet in this new, profoundly altered world in which what _he_ wants has been irrevocably unveiled. He stands before her, devastated and saved from the terrifying brink, and sees with clear eyes the responsibility he bears for her uncertainty. 

It’s the slice of razor blade, quick and ruthless, bloodless and bloody by turns. It is inarguable that he has bent his own desires into shapes without number. He has played myriad roles—would-be conquerer and would-be conquest, sidekick and seducer, friend and unthinking flirt—as though any one would satisfy him, as though any one could ever have satisfied him.

He wants her entirely. He wants the trust she has already placed in him in such large measure, and he wants more. He is greedy for her belief in him, and he wants her to know him for the steady, faithful love he intends to be. He wants the care of her, her joys and sorrows resting on his shoulders and rousing him from sleep when she is in need. He wants her entirely, and he sees he has not shown her that. 

But the world has ended and begun again. 

The future holds more silence for him, more waiting. She is not ready, but is. He looks into his heart and it aches—it certainly aches with the long, rough road they have traveled already—but he sees a store of patience that seems infinite, now that it’s his true face he’ll wear as he walks in this new-made world. He looks into his heart and holds up what he finds there, so it’s plain to see. 

He wants her entirely.   
  


**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: IDK. I’m going to call this a two-shot? This is not satisfying, but it might be the end. 

**Author's Note:**

> A/N: I originally said this would be a [mumble]-shot, because when I posted it to Tumblr, I had a little bit more of this written (if, indeed there is more of whatever “this” is), but I’ve never really known where this was going. I’ve had pieces of it sitting around for probably three years or so and tonight I jostled some of it into a framework and built into that. There’s so much territory between “Can we talk?” and “Someone I trust” and “Josh know about this?” I dunno. For a long time I thought this would be part of a Material Witness piece, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Anyway. 


End file.
